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Homeworks®: A New American Townhouse

by Stephen Kendall PhD

48 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); architectural drawings; catalogue #06-1179; ISBN 1-4120-9424-0; US$15.00, C$17.25, EUR11.69, £7.75

Homeworks® is an approach to consumer-oriented townhouse development that reduces developers' risks, produces buildings that are change-ready, and provides a new framework for housing product and process innovation.

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About the Book

Homeworks® constitutes a natural evolution of the venerable wood frame housing tradition that dominates North American house building. Absence of a systemic rethinking of this tradition has meant that wood frame housing - as a building culture - has lagged behind other economic sectors in quality improvement, sensitivity to consumer preferences and sustainability. Whereas other sectors of the building industry are adopting a more rational and "change-ready" approach - internationally termed "open building" - wood frame housing remains mired in the obsolete concept of "whole-building integration". This inhibits innovation, prevents adoption of smarter labor practices, and produces a housing stock that will be a burden on future generations.

Homeworks® calls for a strict separation between the part of the house that should have a long life, and the part of the house that can be customized initially and adapt over time in response to changing household preferences and upgrades in consumer-sensitive technologies. These parts are called the "Shell" and the "Infil". The Shell is necessarily part of the local setting in all its physical, cultural, regulatory and environmental dimensions. The Shell helps make the urban scene. The Infill is not so constrained by the local scene. It is - and should increasingly be - approved by national certification agencies and distributed in the global marketplace of consumer-oriented products, "kits" and services. It responds more directly to the pulse of change, whereas the Shell is meant to age in place and become part of the social memory of an urban landscape.

Drawing on developments toward open building taking place internationally, and recognizing that changes to a way of building only happen incrementally and can only happen as a process of cultivation, Homeworks® offers principles that may help set the stage for a much needed maturation of wood frame house-building.

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About the Author

Stephen Kendall is a registered architect and educator whose career has been marked by consistent efforts to renew the ways we design and build, and the way we educate the next generations of architects. These efforts center on the widespread recognition that the built environment is subject to change, that this change happens on certain environmental levels and that design is distributed. Professor Kendall has a professional degree in architecture, a Masters degree in urban design and a PhD in Design Theory and Methods, the latter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published many papers and technical reports, is co-author of Residential Open Building (Spon, 1999) and is the joint coordinator of an international commission focused on open building www.open-building.org He lectures widely to academic and professional audiences.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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